Aug 13 | Retreat Diary: Thursday

HOLY READING

From Widening the Horizons: I’d been having trouble struggling through this book, as I realized at some point that, while I understood the concepts the author was illustrating, he was basically describing something I had taken for granted as a kind of “soul-knowledge” using very complicated technical language that was hard to wade through. Today, though, he presented a case study, which, as a narrative itself, was far more interesting to me (go figure).

The case study presents a story of a pastor in a small town who has a great deal of challenges with his congregation. The author claims that he heard the story from said pastor at a conference when the pastor asked the group for advice on his challenges. I won’t go into a lot of detail because you can always read the book yourself, heh heh. This pastor described his role with three functions that I hadn’t really heard before but the author seemed to take for granted. He described his first function as “kingly”, which really set my teeth on edge, not only because I don’t really like a monarchy model, but because it was used to describe his administrative role. I think one’s administrative role in a parish is far too narrowed by a term like “king.” I substituted the word “administrator” whenever I saw “kingly.” the other two functions were “pastoral” (care for all the members of the church) and “prophetic” (bearing witness to the Gospel).

This nuts and bolts chapter was far more helpful for me than the theoretical stuff (those previous chapters even came complete with charts!) In the case study we are given a view into the context of the town by way of an informal social analysis, which situates the community in a narrative. In the story, much of the power in the town can be traced to sources outside and beyond the control of the town, such as the absentee owners of an important local company. Those sources of power within the town, particularly the long-time mayor, are corrupt and not even in a great deal of denial about it. The people have since become apathetic – nothing ever changes. Perhaps the role of pastoral care, then, involves re-igniting hope.

In Gerkin’s analysis of the case study, he helpfully points out the fragmentation visible in the pastor’s presentation of those three roles. He also reminds us that God is already always working in any given situation. When that is your prime assumption (your “baseline,” to borrow and re-appropriate some terminology from the nurses, heh), I think things never look quite as daunting as they might seem at first.

-Clarity